


Compliance/Control

by Yeomanrand



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Bucky Barnes Feels, Captain America: Civil War (Movie) Spoilers, Gen, Not much Steve or Tony, POV Bucky Barnes, POV Male Character, POV Third Person Limited, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Present Tense, Spoilers, Wordcount: 1.000-3.000, spoilers kinda
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-06
Updated: 2016-06-06
Packaged: 2018-07-12 17:30:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,100
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7115473
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Yeomanrand/pseuds/Yeomanrand
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bucky's internal landscape during and immediately following Captain America: Civil War</p>
            </blockquote>





	Compliance/Control

**Author's Note:**

> Many, many thanks to my bff and beta reader shinychimera. If there's something wrong with my Romanian, please let me know (Google Translate is great but it's not perfect).

Above all, Bucky wants to go home. Wants to see Steve, sleep in the same space, breathe the same air (whether or not they share the same bed), have one meal together before he turns himself in. Before he accepts whatever punishment he has coming (because the guilty must be punished and, whether or not it was his will, it was his body). Imprisonment is the easiest of the consequences to bear but the most worrisome. He will behave even if he ends up facing life, or death, trusting Steve to visit him now and again.

Conversations on a prison telephone, recorded, no contact but still face-to-face.

*

Bucky stays a ghost, picks fresh food from the market, does the same kinds of odd jobs for the same under-the-table cash ( _leu_ rather than dollars) he'd done in Brooklyn before the war. Only enough to keep food on the table, a roof over his head. He writes down everything he remembers, writing late into the nights by candle or moonlight (cheaper and less noticeable than turning the electricity on in the _apartament_ ) because he needs them tangible, needs easy retrieval if he is made to forget again. Writes as the memories come, some nights one at a time, some nights tumbling over each other until his hand cramps. He spends the early mornings flagging and indexing and making his memories as real and accessible as possible. 

He stores everything but the current notebook in his go-bag under the floorboard and doesn't let himself ache for Steve and for home.

*

The thing he knows, intimately, the thing he's not sure Steve and his friends realize, is that Hydra always plays the long game. Generations long, or longer. He doesn't know _why_ he was sent on the retrieval mission, why his orders were to leave no witnesses ( _Sergeant Barnes_? Howard Stark forever asks in Bucky's memory, Bucky's hands dragging him bleeding from the wrecked car), but he knows there were reasons beyond the ones he can extrapolate. They probably couldn't have anticipated the _Man_ Tony Stark would become, but Stark was already a genius; one of the few people alive who could work out some of what was done to Bucky.

(Stark either knows who killed his parents, or he will find out, and Bucky has come up with fifteen possibilities for the aftermath of such a discovery. All but one have negative results for everyone involved.)

Since that night, though, Bucky has known he couldn't go to Tony Stark and ask for help with the arm if he should be away from his keepers and it should fail, or with unraveling his programming. Just as he cannot go home, turn himself in to Steve and Natasha and the others. Because Hydra plans long-term. Because the moment he stops being a ghost, the moment he returns to the world, there will be handlers waiting. Or worse, some unknown faction will have uncovered his book, his words, the ability to lash him to compliance to their will. And then all the dark memories (and he remembers every death at his hands, flesh and metal, every act of violence), the _soldat_ still coded into him, will become real again.

And the notebooks, with all their precious memories, will become the last unburied remains of Bucky Barnes.

*

He's half on the run already when Steve appears, out of place and incongruous despite his face on the newspaper, the reaction of the _vânzător_. (He remembers asking Steve if he was going to keep the outfit but there's always been a time and place for subtlety.) Bucky only came back to the _apartament_ for the go-bag and his books of memory. Had no reason to think the response time would be so fast.

Steve believes this moment doesn't have to end in a fight, but Bucky knows better. No matter how much he wants to metaphorically lay down his arms and surrender to Steve. Go home. Accept punishment. 

It turns out Bucky wants to live. And it has to end in a fight because the _soldat_ 's enforced compliance has already almost killed Steve once.

So he runs and he fights for his life without killing anyone and Steve, loyal fool that he is, has Bucky's six.

*

He cannot run enough, air and exhaust burning his lungs. He surrenders, because he must. Quietly accepts chair and cage as punishment's beginning.

Knows in the end even these restraints would not hold him, if he chose--or was forced--to break free. The question is whether he can tear them down before someone on the outside can say ten simple words.

*

Hydra plans ahead but the man with his book, the man ignoring his plea, the man locking Bucky back inside the _soldat_ and demanding his memory of 1991, the Starks, the camera, the other _zimniye soldaty_ is not Hydra. Bucky doesn't know who or what he is and, locked away from self-control by forced-compliance, finds his nightmares coming true.

Of them all, only Natasha recognizes Bucky isn't home.

*

Bucky knows exactly what Zemo wants Tony Stark to see, without ever looking at the screen. Lowers his head so he doesn't have to watch the horror spread across Stark's face. Doesn't run, doesn't consider running. Flinches when he realizes, with Stark: Steve knew. Grits his teeth and with every last scrap of the determination he'd used to save anyone he could, anyone he hadn't been required by inculcated compliance to kill, tries to will Steve to stand down.

He should know better. Steven Grant Rogers never did make good choices.

And Bucky's pretty sure they've been finishing each other's fights as long as either can remember.

*

"You sure about this?"

Facing his future, the Wakandan stasis device cleaner and more comfortably designed but still a horror of cold and half-formed dreams, Bucky almost doesn't hear Steve's question. There's a rushing in his ears, a wrenchingly-familiar sick feeling in his gut (the moment he wakes up before _gruzovoy vagon_ , before _Gotov vypolnit'_ , before he shuts down, ice binding him in an immobile body) and the answer he doesn't give Steve is: he's not sure. He can't know if he'll be in compliance or control when he wakes up, and not knowing is more terrifying than facing an Iron Man determined to kill him. 

"I can't trust my own mind. I think going back under is the best thing."

Above all, until they can clear out his programming, the safest thing for Steve and T'challa and their friends and Bucky himself, the best of all their bad choices, is to freeze the ghost.


End file.
